knowledge. It is clearly stated by Anderson, in Nunan 2003:67, who defines reading as the fluent process of readers combining information from a text
and their own background knowledge to build meaning and he also adds that the goal of reading activities is comprehension. Furthermore Anderson also
states that reading activities are divided into two namely strategic reading and fluent reading. Strategic reading is defined as the ability of the reader to use a
wide variety of reading strategies to accomplish a purpose of reading. Good readers know what to do when they encounter difficulties.
…competent reader will quickly reject the irrelevant information and find what he is looking for. Grellet, 1981:3
The second activity is fluent reading. It is defined as the ability to read at an appropriate rate with adequate comprehension. Meaning does not lie in the
reader or in the text. Meaning should be created by integrating reader’s background knowledge and the text.
b. The purpose of reading
Reading is an activity with purposes. We read for several reasons. Grellet 1981: 4 lists two purposes in reading. They are: reading for pleasure
and reading for finding and getting certain information. In addition to that, Rivers 1981:260 states that students who learn language need reading to
have access to the literature and periodicals, or scientific and technical journals, written in the language they are learning.
More specifically, Mickulecky and Jeffries 1996:1 say that reading in English specify at least the following importance:
1. Reading helps students to learn to think in English
2. Reading can enlarge English vocabulary
3. Reading can help students improve their writing
4. Reading is a good way to find out about new ideas, facts, and
experiences.
c. Reading Involves some Skills
Grellet 1981:4 states that reading involves a variety of skills as follows: 1.
Recognizing the script of language 2
2. Deducing the meaning and use of unfamiliar lexical items
3. Understanding explicitly and non explicitly stated information
4. Understanding conceptual meaning
5. Understanding relations within the sentences and between the parts of
the text 6.
Recognizing indicators in discourse and identifying the main point or important information in a piece of discourse
7. Extracting salient points to summarize the text, an idea, etc and
selective extraction of relevant points from a text. Grellet adds that several activities and exercises can be used to develop
those skills mentioned above. The ability to convey those skills in reading activities will lead to students’ reading comprehension.
d. Reading Strategies
There are strategies that we can apply in the classroom to help students to read more quickly and effectively. They are:
1. Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get
a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection 2.
Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using
knowledge of the text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make
predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content 3.
Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions
4. Guessing from context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the
ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up
5. Paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension
by restating the information and ideas in the text http:www.nclc.org
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e. Guided Reading
